American Politics: Why the Thrill Is Gone

Earlier this month, the Upshot—the Times’s “politics and policy vertical,” as it’s known in the business—ran a lengthy analysis of the Presidential campaign on the Republican side. The piece came up with three categories of candidates: Invisible Primary Leaders, those early favorites who lock up the party regulars and the money ahead of the first vote (Al Gore and George W. Bush, in 2000; Mitt Romney, in 2012; Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, in 2016); Mainstream Alternatives, who are broadly popular enough to be viable nominees (John McCain, in 2000; Barack Obama, in 2008; Scott Walker and Marco Rubio, in 2016); and Factional Favorites, those candidates with a strong following in one section of the party (Howard Dean, in 2004; Rick Santorum, in 2012; Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, in 2016).

It was an original and useful guide to the race, helping make sense of the state of play nine months before the Iowa caucuses and a year and a half out from the election. The Upshot’s upshot was that, amid the forest of names on the Republican side, “two figures—Jeb Bush and Scott Walker—have quickly moved to the head of the pack. Perhaps only Mr. Rubio has a good chance to join them at the top.” The reasons have to do with fundraising, positioning, élite support, broad acceptability—that is, with the roles spelled out in the piece. The author, Nate Cohn, concluded, “It will be fun to watch.”

That was when he lost me.

It might not be wise for a sometime political journalist to admit this, but the 2016 campaign doesn’t seem like fun to me. Watching Marco Rubio try to overcome his past support for immigration reform to win enough conservative votes to become the Mainstream Alternative to the Invisible Primary Leader—who, if there is one, will be a candidate named Bush—doesn’t seem like fun. Nor does analyzing whether Chris Christie can become something more than the Factional Favorite of moderate Republicans, or whether Ted Cruz’s impressive early fundraising will make him that rare thing, a Factional Favorite with an outside chance to win. If this is any kind of fun, it’s the kind of fun I associate with reading about seventeenth-century French execution methods, or watching a YouTube video of a fight between a python and an alligator. Fun in small doses, as long as you’re not too close.

American politics in general doesn’t seem like fun these days. There’s nothing very entertaining about super PACs, or Mike Huckabee’s national announcement of an imminent national announcement of whether he will run for President again. Jeb Bush’s ruthless approach to locking up the exclusive services of longstanding Republican political consultants and media professionals far ahead of the primaries doesn’t quicken my pulse. Scott Walker’s refusal to affirm Barack Obama’s patriotism doesn’t shock me into a state of alert indignation. A forthcoming book with revelations about the Clintons’ use of their offices and influence to raise money for their foundation and grow rich from paid speeches neither surprises me nor gladdens my heart.

Since I was eight years old, and the Republican candidates were named Nixon, Rockefeller, and Reagan, and the Democrats were Humphrey, Kennedy, and McCarthy, I’ve been passionate about American politics, as a student, a witness, and a partisan. Politics was in my blood, at the family dinner table, in my work and my free time. But at some point in the past few years it went dead for me, or I for it. Perhaps it was week thirty-eight of the Obama-Romney race (a campaign between “Forward” and “Believe in America”), or the routinization of the filibuster, or the name Priorities USA Action, or the fifty-eighth vote in Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act—something happened that made it very hard to continue paying attention. I don’t take this as a sign of personal superiority: I’ve always disliked people who considered themselves to be “above” politics. I mourn my lack of political passion as I would if I were to lose interest in reading fiction, or to stop caring about someone who’d been important to me for most of my life. And I count on getting back the feeling—the intense mix of love, hatred, anxiety, astonishment, and gratification—because life, public life, is impoverished without it. Perhaps it will return sometime before November 8, 2016. But for now—I have to be honest—it’s gone.

The reason is the stuckness of American politics. Especially in the years after 2008, the worst tendencies of American politics only hardened, while remaining in the same place. Beneath the surface froth and churn, we are paralyzed. You can sense it as soon as you step out of the train at Union Station in Washington, the instant you click on a Politico article about a candidates’ forum in Iowa: miasma settles over your central nervous system and you start to go numb. What has happened is that the same things keep happening. The tidal wave of money keeps happening, the trivialization of coverage keeps happening, the extremism of the Republican Party keeps happening (Ted Cruz: abolish the I.R.S.; Rand Paul: the Common Core is “un-American”). The issues remain huge and urgent: inequality, global warming, immigration, poorly educated children, American decline, radical Islamism. But the language of politics stays the same, and it is a dead language. The notion that answers will come from Washington or the campaign trail is beyond far-fetched.

It’s easy to denounce the political class, but in a democracy the public generally deserves the leaders it gets. The populist surges of the past few years—the Tea Party on the right, Occupy Wall Street on the left—have been no more convincing than the ideas of élites, though energy from below is in itself an encouraging thing. I’ve always rejected the politics of anti-politics, whether it came from Jerry Brown, Ross Perot, or Ronald Reagan. So it would be churlish not to end with a short wish list for the 2016 campaign.

A Democrat—Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, Deval Patrick—should give Hillary Clinton a serious, sustained challenge, for her and the party’s sake if nothing else. With competition, she’d be a better candidate; without, the yearlong vacuum will be filled with investigations, inconsequential gaffes, hyper-carefulness, and crushing boredom.

A Republican should run against the Republican Congress. Its negativism has become a disgrace to the party and the country. Such a campaign would have obvious enemies, but it would also tell voters that at least one candidate is willing to put country ahead of party.

Some candidate should unilaterally disarm, refuse super PAC money, and call out the corruption of all the others. That would mean losing, of course—but, hell, almost all of them are going to lose anyway.

Some big-money donors should do the equivalent. Regardless of the disclosure requirements, they should name the recipient of every dollar they give, and shame others for not doing the same.

Clinton should give the boldest speech of her career, on inequality. In it, she should criticize the policies of financial deregulation that took off during her husband’s Presidency, acknowledging that that is their provenance and connecting them to the deep unfairness of our economy.

A Republican and a Democrat with national reputations should hold hands and break the partisan rules. They should announce early on the intention of making the other his or her running mate in the event of winning the nomination—if only to test whether the political center is really as dead as it seems.

Political reporters should embrace the value of objective truth, and adopt a policy of never repeating a party or a candidate’s dubious or false statement without exposing it in the next sentence.

Policies and their consequences should be the main story, tactics the footnote. Coverage of a candidate’s positioning on this or that issue should include a reminder of the context: notwithstanding No. 6 above, the differences between the two parties are clear, stark, and uniform across almost all issues.

None of it is likely to happen. Any of it would make American politics more relevant, more interesting—maybe even more fun.